Lecture discusses 'Shroud of Turin'

It's a shroud shrouded in mystery. A lecture Thursday discussed the image of the crucified Jesus Christ on a "shroud" burial cloth.\nThe talk, given by IU alumni Professor John Beldon Scott from the University of Iowa, was titled "The Shroud of Turin as a Work of Art." The actual shroud, said to depict the body of Jesus, is housed in Turin, Italy. Most years the Archdiocese of Turin doesn't even put it on display. Last time it came out the pope attended.\n"This lecture is not to try to prove anything," Scott said, "but to show what we get when we look at (the shroud of Turin) in a different way than we've looked at it previously."\nScott explained the history of the relic and explored its place in popular culture before launching into an interpretation of the shroud based on techniques used to analyze pieces of art. \n"What can we discover about it if we look at it as if it were art?" Scott asked.\nMost of the lecture was devoted to the discussion of the physical properties of the shroud, especially the damages on the piece from various episodes during its recorded history, but also concentrated on the stylistic relationships to other pieces of art.\nThe Web site www.shroud.com brought up an ongoing controversy about whether the shroud is authentic. But belief in the burial cloth of Jesus was irrelevant to this study of the shroud.\n"In studying this relic we can learn about ourselves, our society, and our society's institutions," he said.\nSophomore Julie Jochim, an art education major, attended the lecture to fulfill a requirement to a class.\n "It was really interesting," she said. "I didn't really know a lot about (the shroud), but the lecture was really broad."\n-- Contact staff writer Jenny Kobiela at jkobiela@indiana.edu.